Long Summer Day (12 page)

At that Rudd swung round and said earnestly, ‘Well then, I accept, and I must say it’s damned generous of you, Mr Craddock! I won’t pretend that I should find it a big wrench to leave here. As I said, I haven’t been all that happy but I’ve always loved the place. There’s been indifference here, and plenty of sloth too, but I still think the place could respond to a little care and imagination. You know what they say about a woman who is loved? She takes on self-confidence and beauty, and I’ve always thought this could happen here. Anyway, I’ll promise you two things. I’ll give you honest advice, and my heart will be in the job!’

‘Well that should do for a start,’ said Paul and they shook hands on the bargain, spending the morning touring the Home Farm, which seemed to Paul well administered by Tom Honeyman, a plodding, bald-headed man, whose enthusiasm was reserved for Southdown sheep, for he was descended (or claimed to be) from the Newbury farmer who once won a thousand guineas from the local squire by making a hunting coat from wool sheared from a pair of Southdowns that same day. Honeyman was a widower, with grown children, all farming outside the estate boundaries, and managed the farm with a cowman, three or four boys, and two biblical looking shepherds, known as Matt and Luke, who were twins and, so Rudd informed Paul, unable to read or write. Later they went up to the house to select items of furniture that might be bought in at ten per cent above the reserve price. This seemed to Paul a very arbitrary way of doing business, for the sale had been advertised for the following day, and it occurred to him that bidders might be coming some distance to buy lots that they would now find withdrawn, but Rudd pooh-poohed his doubts. ‘It was laid down in the conditions of sale that anything the purchaser of the estate wanted he was to have,’ he told Paul. ‘The executors are more interested in selling the estate than disposing of the bits and pieces, and anyway, a lot of the stuff here is either worn out or second rate.’ Paul discovered, on closer inspection, that this was so. Most of the furniture was heavy mid-Victorian pieces whereas the carpets were badly worn, except in the main bedrooms which did not appear to have been used much. He had an opportunity, on going round with Rudd, to get better bearings on the house and found it longer and narrower than he had imagined, with a spacious drawing-room, and a dining-room respectively east and west of the entrance hall, a smaller and very cheerful library, stocked with over a thousand books leading out of the drawing-room, a billiard-room adjoining the dining-room, and a warren of passages and pantries about the huge Elizabethan kitchen that still had its great hearth, and antediluvian cooking implements. Kitchen and domestic quarters lay behind the east wing and opened upon a wide, cobbled yard, enclosed by stables and coach house. The woods here began at the end of the kitchen garden, which rose steeply, making the back of the house rather sunless, except in the late afternoon. Behind the garden, which was in good order and enclosed by a mellow brick wall, was an orchard and Rudd said that in springtime this was full of daffodils and narcissi, and that later bluebells grew there so thickly that the ground was a blue mist. Paul asked him if he was fond of gardening and he said no but had an interest in wild flowers, which he was usually reluctant to admit. ‘For a countryman to confess to a liking for wild flowers is tantamount to him saying he opposes blood sports,’ he said with a chuckle.

They went up the backstairs and along the rearward passage to the staff sleeping quarters. Evidence of neglect and decay were everywhere, plaster and paper peeling from the walls and at one place, on the east wall, a wide crack in the ceiling and a hole in the roof of the attic through which they could see the sky. Here the tiny bedrooms, some half-dozen of them, were airless boxes containing little besides an iron cot or two, a truckle bed and a few stools. Rudd told him that when Sir George had been in residence he kept a full staff of servants, sometimes as many as a dozen variously employed as kitchen hands, parlourmaids and grooms, apart from the resident housekeeper and three gardeners, but that when the house was empty all but the gardeners and Mrs Handcock, the housekeeper, were paid off, ‘like a crew engaged for a single voyage’. When Paul asked if this had not caused distress in the area Rudd said that it had, particularly in winter, but that regular work in the Sorrel Valley had never been plentiful and the family had not had difficulty in recruiting casual labour whenever they came down for a hunting season, or the period preceding or following the London season. ‘They wasted money they begrudged putting into the estate,’ he said. ‘I’ve known young Hubert pay out two hundred guineas for a hunt supper here but they paid atrocious wages, spending what they saved on any number of fads, like the old man’s passion for photography. He had a dark-room off the library and his paraphernalia is still there, together with hundreds of photographs he took and developed. You can see what needs spending on the house before you start on the farms but I can find you a good local builder and if we get his estimate right away I daresay he’ll move in and live here until the job’s done. He can sub-contract for the painting and plumbing and we shall need Vicary, the Coombe Bay stonemason. After the sale we can make a plan as to what’s necessary and what, if anything, you would like knocked down or built on.’

There was no bathroom—the Lovells seemed to have washed in wooden tubs—but the three main bedrooms at the front of the house were in better repair than the reception-rooms on the ground floor. Two of these bedrooms looked over the paddocks and ford, and a string of smaller guest-rooms, ending in the nursery, faced west. Paul noticed that the scrap screen and the rocking horse were labelled Lots 250 and 251, and he wondered if Grace Lovell would bid for them. In the largest bedroom was a huge four-poster and two or three pieces of late eighteenth-century furniture, including a serpentine chest of drawers, a military chest converted into a wardrobe, and two or three rosewood wig-stands which he said he would buy, together with about twenty lots in the guest-rooms and the rooms downstairs. He also marked down the library furniture and books, promising himself some pleasant winter evenings in what seemed to him the cosiest room in the house. The windows here looked over Shallowford Woods and Coombe Bluff and there was a deep leather armchair promising solid comfort in front of a wide stone hearth. When the list was complete they made their way back to the lodge and Rudd totted up the cost of the items Paul had bought in, making a total of under four hundred pounds. This excluded the grey, the trap and the tack in the harness room, which came to another hundred and fifty, so that Paul told himself he had done a good day’s business, particularly when Rudd explained that all the gardening tools were included in the overall purchase price. That night Paul told the agent the source of his legacy and something of Zorndorff’s part in the adventure. He was frank about his means, thinking it unfair to both of them if Rudd, who would be responsible for the initial outlay, remained in the dark and was tempted to either cheesepare or overspend.

‘Well,’ said Rudd, bracing himself as though to speak an unpleasant truth, ‘I promised you good advice and I’ll give you some right away. Don’t tell anyone else what you’ve just told me—the source of the money, that is, or your association with trade of any kind. You are simply a fortunate young man who has come into a legacy and if you’re wise you’ll leave it at that! There’s nobody in the world so snobbish as the peasant with a straw in his mouth!’ As he spoke they heard the hooves on the gravel of the drive and through the open window saw Rose and Claire Derwent trot past on their way up to the house. Rudd said, with a chuckle, ‘One thing more, Mr Craddock!’ and pointed with his pipe at the disappearing horse-women— ‘Are you the marrying type? Or committed elsewhere?’ and when Paul admitted that he had never seriously thought of marriage the agent added, ‘Then I’d best warn you of something else while I’m at it! Every filly hereabouts will be anticipating the hunting season by a couple of months or more! There go two who have already started cubbing, so to speak, so sit tight until they move on to draw the next covert!’

It seemed that every man, woman and child as far afield as Whinmouth, and the villages north of the railway line, had taken time off to attend Shallowford House sale. By ten o’clock, an hour before bidding was due to commence, paddocks and forecourt were the scene of a vast picnic, with everyone in their summer best and ranks of gigs, traps, waggonettes and saddle-horses tethered to palings behind the avenue chestnuts. Paul and Rudd made their way to the house through groups of respectful strangers, some of them people Paul remembered having met on his tour. He saw Tamer Potter already refreshing himself out of an enormous flagon of cider, with his three girls gossiping with young men in corduroys under the trees, and their brothers Sam and Smut talking to a man in velveteens, who looked as if he was lecturing them, for he kept making emphatic gestures as Sam looked sheepish and Smut listened with a broad grin on his sunburned face. ‘That’s Melrose, Lord Gilroy’s head keeper,’ Rudd told Paul, as they walked up the drive, ‘giving Smut Potter another of his final warnings! There’s Arabella, with Martin in tow. I daresay she’ll make him bid for one or two of the fancy lots. And there’s Dr O’Keefe,’ and Rudd pointed to a rather handsome old man, in a black frock coat, leaning negligently against a tree, surveying the gathering with contempt. ‘And there’s Lord Gilroy himself, out for an airing after his last spell of gout. He’s a supercilious old rascal but I daresay he’ll be civil enough and suspend judgment on you until somebody gets wind of your connection with a scrapyard! After that he’ll cut you, but you can get along without Gilroy patronage—the Lovells did!’

‘I’m a bit astonished by the grip the eighteenth century still has on the area,’ Paul said when they had been admitted by the back door and had moved into one of the rooms facing the terrace where they could overlook the crowd in the paddocks and drive.

‘What else did you expect?’ Rudd said. ‘We only got our railway link four years ago, and I can remember
The Times
being read aloud in the bar of the Raven once a week! You’ve caught us at an intermediary stage—say about 1860, and I think this might be the source of some of your biggest headaches! You saw one or two reach for their forelocks at the farms but when they realised they were doing it instinctively they felt shamefaced, and that’s a bad thing. Either a man freely acknowledges power of wealth and class, or he doesn’t think of himself as anything but a free man, with a free man’s privilege of telling the squire to treat him as one or go fishing! Take that mob out there, flirting, guzzling and skylarking around the waggons. Not one in fifty has any intention of bidding for anything here. With one or two exceptions they couldn’t afford to pay for it if it was knocked down by them, but does that stop them making a fête out of the sale? Why, bless you, Sir George Lovell in his heyday would have had his keeper herd them the far side of the ford but today there they are and not a blush between them, except when Parson Bull buttonholes sermon-dodgers and threatens to name slackers publicly from the pulpit! There he is now, giving Arthur Pitts the edge of his tongue,’ and Paul saw a massively built clergyman, with a great mop of white hair, hectoring a downcast-looking Arthur, who stood with his wife Martha in the forecourt awaiting the auctioneer’s signal to unlock the front door.

‘What kind of man is Bull?’ Paul enquired. ‘I daresay I shall have to attend church as soon as I settle in,’ and Rudd chuckled and said that even Sir George Lovell had been circumspect in his dealings with Bull, who was probably the last buttress of the eighteenth century in the Valley, for he hunted three times a week, swore freely in public and usually called for a tot of brandy before dispensing communion wine to his flock. ‘Willoughby, the Non-conformist, once challenged him outside The Raven, accusing him of setting a bad example to his parishioners,’ he said, ‘but Bull only shouted, “If you meet a man carrying a lantern on a dark night don’t question his character, you dissenting knave! Just be grateful for the light he’s shedding, in the hope that it will keep your erring feet clear of hell!” He’s a hard man is Bull, but he’s respected. He’s a real man, you see, and they prefer that to someone who hands out the Gentle Jesus brand of Christianity!’

The auctioneer asked Rudd if it was time to open the doors and when Rudd said it was Paul withdrew and watched the bidding, almost all the lots on the ground floor being knocked down to a dealer from Whinmouth, rumoured to be bidding on Lord Gilroy’s behalf, or to one of the auctioneer’s staff acting for absent clients. He recognised Claire Derwent’s blonde head under the rostrum and she saw him and smiled, nudging her sister Rose and then looking quickly away. Arabella Codsall bought a mirror and one or two figurines, and in addition to greeting the Pitts and Tamer Potter, Paul acknowledged the polite greetings of Willoughby, his shy daughter Elinor, and the grim-faced Edward Derwent, who never once took his eyes off the auctioneer but offered no bids, either by word or gesture. After a time Paul’s leg began to ache so he drifted into the library and thence into the adjoining room that Sir George had used as a photographer’s studio. The window was still draped with black cloth and when he had ripped it down, and opened the window, he saw a jumble of faded photographs, hypo baths and fixing frames left on the benches by the late owner. The pictures gave him a closer insight into the family than he had obtained from reading the
Illustrated London News.
He decided that George Lovell was no ordinary amateur but a technician with imagination and finesse, for there were some cleverly posed groups under the chestnuts, and several excellent pictures of horses and of meets in the forecourt outside. There were also souvenir pictures of fancy-dress balls of more than twenty years ago, dated and signed on the back in Sir George’s spidery hand-writing—
Shallowford Christmas Rout, 1882,
and
Harvest Ball, 1883,
large photographs showing groups of Robin Hoods, Dick Turpins and fairy-tale characters. It all seemed to belong to an age as far away as Waterloo, or before then, when choleric squires dispensed lavish hospitality and drunk themselves insensible after gruelling days in the hunting field. Looking at them Paul thought of what Rudd had said regarding the transitional stage at Shallowford, and its time lag, reflecting that he would be the person responsible for quickening the tempo but he also wondered if good intentions and an injection of capital would be enough to drag this self-contained little community into the twentieth century? Did the people of the Sorrel Valley acknowledge the Age of Progress that everybody in London talked about? Had they ever devoted a moment’s thought to airships, and electric lighting, to motors, phonographs, and higher education? And even if they had, would any of these things add anything important to their lives?